Sunday, April 20, 2008

If I have to hear someone brag about how superior they are because they recycle I think I am going to puke. Oh sure, I have done it too... mostly because I think its funny to make other people feel bad... but really lets just agree to stop, okay? I am also going to have to call foul and introduce a rule:

If you are required by law in your municipality to recycle, you cannot brag that you recycle.

I dont mean stop recycling. Or to be more specific, I dont mean stop recycling entirely. I mean to recycle where it makes sense.

You might ask: How, dear Spork, do I figure out when it makes sense and when it doesnt make sense to recycle? There is one answer, but it has a few corollaries.

It makes sense to recycle when the recycling pays for itself. Or even better, when it makes a profit.

A major corollary here (and it applies to almost anything) is this: If the government mandates it, then it wont make sense. The bad thing here is that even if it did make sense, once the government gets their grubby paws on it they will find a way to make it lose money.

I know, I know. What I am saying is heresy. Why in the world would anyone say NOT to recycle? I think its best not to start there. I will instead start with what it does make sense to recycle:

Iron/Steel - in large quantities make perfect sense. And in fact this has been going on for years and years without any prodding from the government. There is almost no steel product made that isnt made of some amount of recycled iron/steel products. It pays about 14 cents a pound so you had better have a lot. It may or may not make sense to have a special truck just to pick up your tin cans. (The price is "last I checked..." I dont update stuff I rant about so this may be way off in days, months or years.)

Aluminum - absolutely. Aluminum is really expensive to extract from bauxite and it takes a whole lot of stuff to make only a little stuff. It might make sense to drive a truck around to pick this stuff up. But you really should do the math and figure it out. On the plus side, the recycled cans are infinitely recyclable and are much cheaper to process than digging it out of the ground.

Glass - probably is okay to recycle. It is an infinitely recyclable product and it is somewhat cheaper to melt the old stuff than to start from scratch.

But I think we might have to stop the list there.

Dont get me started on plastic.

Plastic is basically made from crude oil. And you might say "we need to reduce our oil consumption." Okay, maybe. But it isnt like if we stopped making plastic we would actually reduce the amount of oil we consume. They break oil down into various components. Some are used to make gasoline, some go into Quaker State, some goes into diesel. And some is used to make plastic.

In essence, it is a clever use for what used to be a waste product. This is the ultimate in recycling. This is the "everything but the oink" that we apply to the pig except applied to raw crude. (Mmmmmm, pork.)

Recycling plastic would make sense if it made money. It doesnt. You see as long as you are driving your car or heating your house or leaving on a jet plane, you are driving the use of oil. As long as they make fuel out of oil, there will be raw materials for plastic.

But you might point out that manufacturing of new plastics from recycled saves oil and saves landfill space. No, I dont think it does. It doesnt save oil because its a by product. We still are using the same amount of oil as before.

It doesnt save landfill space because you still have a by-product. You either have to make something with it (that goes in a landfill) or put it in a landfill as a by-product.

And if you dont like plastic (because it is related to oil or it makes your grandmother cry or whatever) then by all means: recycling isnt the answer. Recycling plastic is nothing more than a government subsidy to the plastic industry. While it is true that making new plastic from recycled plastic requires less raw materials (that have to go somewhere). Making plastic from recycled material means your tax money is going to pay for the manufacturing of plastic. Why you say? Because recycling plastic costs more. It costs more because you have to have a special truck (which uses fossil fuels) drive around and collect it. You then have to sort it. And clean it. And process it.

They will tell you that it is cheaper to make new plastic from recycled plastic. And in some ways that is true. It is true because the horriffic cost of the recycling truck and the processing plant is taken on by you when you pay your garbage collection bill. This makes a super cheap raw material that is already preprocessed. So yes it is cheaper.... for the manufacturer. But it is not cheaper overall. It is only cheaper because a government has collected an involuntary tax (tacked onto your garbage collection bill) and used that money to subsidize the plastics industry. And they didnt even send you a thank you card.

There is also a huge glut on the market for all the municipalities that are trying to sell their ultra cheap subsidized pre-processed plastic. And it is not uncommon that the plastic you put in your recycling bin today actually gets trucked around town in a special truck, sorted, washed, processed, baled.... and put in the landfill. Your tax dollars at work. Wouldnt it have been easier to just put it in the trash in the first place?

Trees. They are really pretty. I personally love them a whole lot. That is one reason I moved out to live in the forest area. So of course recycling paper makes sense. You dont cut down the beautiful trees. You couldnt be more wrong.

They dont cut down huge pretty mature trees to make paper. They cut down huge pretty mature trees to make houses. And furniture. But it is rare you hear people rant about how you should live in smaller houses (which in turn use less furnishings). In fact, it is usually the ones living in the biggest, newest houses that make the biggest noise on recycling.

Let me let you in on a secret: If you are really into saving trees, the ultimate in recycling is to buy a small house that already exists in an established neighborhood.

Paper does come from trees. Just not mature trees. It comes from farms that plant trees, cut them down young, pulp them and plant new ones. Its like growing wheat. In fact, if you didnt grow the trees for paper, the farmer would likely plant a different cash crop. And you still arent going to have trees there.

And paper recycling isnt all its cracked up to be. It is a nasty dirty business. A business that actually generates toxic waste. If you throw an ink stained bit of paper in the trash, it goes to the landfill in a tiny quantity.

If you chemically wash the paper with harsh chemicals, you get a mass amount of toxic sludge. But that is okay, because it is "good for the planet."

And if you listen to Al Gore (whom I might have mentioned, I think is an airbag) you will hear him say how new growth forest is good for the planet and reduces carbon. Yadda yadda yadda. Okay, so if you were to invest in new growth forest to help the planet, what do you think you would be investing in? That's right: paper production. Paper is a constant supply of new growth forest products.

So if you recycle paper, you generate toxic waste and you are using subsidies to decrease new growth forests -- that thing Mr. Gore so admires. In effect, you are spending your tax dollars to do the OPPOSITE of what you intended.... which is quite often the case of how government works.

So please. PLEASE. Stop bragging about recycling until you stop driving your car, stop heating your house and stop using electricity from the grid. And if you live in a big new house, you are a tree killer. Oh, and thanks for killing the earth.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

So I was just driving along, minding my own business. We were running to the post office to fetch our mail from our PO Box. And right there across the street from the post office I see a really spiffy Triumph TR6 (Translation: for those of you that dont know, a Triumph is a car maker, not just a seventies rock band and motorcycle manufacturer). I pointed and turned to Ellie Mae and said "gah-gah-gah". (Look dear, there is a fine specimen.) You see, you just don't see Triumphs around here much.... And then I saw another, and a Spitfire. And a TR3. And a Stag. (Yes, Triumph made more than a TR7 wedge.)

In my effort to try to be less of a hermit and actually meet people that live nearby (big move for me), I actually went into the restaurant, found a big table of people that looked triumphy (I don't care if it isnt in your dictionary, it is in mine) and asked what the heck was going on. I was hoping there was a local Triumph club... and there is not. I did, however, find out there was a regional Triumph meetup right here in the middle of nowhere!

So I went home (metal shack in the woods) and washed (scraped 3 years of dirt off) my little Triumph (rust bucket). What followed were 3 days of putting around in my little car (sore ass).

Photographic evidence can be found on picasa. I tried to obscure all the plates for the truly paranoids out there... but if you told your wife you were on a business trip and went off for a weekend with the mistress -- well sorry about that.

The fallout: estimated 150 miles on the old car (estimated because the odometer ceased working in 1984); found oozing slave cylinder (its not a leak, its an ooze); snapped tachometer cable (original to the car I would guess. Broken by what I am guessing is a careless mechanic [me] 23 years ago that might have put the distributor drive gear 25 degrees off of correct.).

Just in case you cannot read that last line... I think it says "First Place". If you dont know what a Funkana is, imagine drunken bar games.... except in a car.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

the recipe called for an optional 2-3 whole black pepper corns. I threw in probably 1/2 to a whole teaspoon of them. It seems that black pepper is more alcohol soluble than bacon. A couple is probably a better number.

the porkotini needs a salty back flavor. Vermouth isnt right. I also tried about 1/8 tsp of soy sauce (better) and I tried about 1/8 tsp of Worcester sauce (started off good, ended not so good). It might just need a half pinch of kosher salt. (Kosher salt because nothing goes better with bacon than kosher food.)

the bacon wrapped olives are fabulous. I could eat a plate of them, especially if soaked in porkotini. But you gotta wrap the little buggers fast or the bacon gets too crispy to wrap. You are left with a handful of bacon bits.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Okay, this takes a little setup explanation for those of you that dont live in my neck of the woods. You may think there are lots of nutto religious extremists where ever you live, but if you don't live in Warren Jeff's compound, I think I may have you beat.

There is this one vet's office we drive by almost every single day on the way to/from town. And instead of something "normal" on his marquee like "Merry Catmas and a Barky new year" or "Vet Techs needed, apply inside" -- he has really really bizzarro religious nutty stuff. In many cases, the sign doesnt even make syntactical sense -- almost like written by Yoda it was.

I almost peed myself with fits and giggles over his current sign:

Now there are multitudes of reasons why this is funny... and it mostly is because this sign is so absolutely true.

The logically implied corollary of this is "Love that IS based on love of god first is self loathing in disguise".

Not so implied, but more explicit is the idea that love of self is evil and wrong. Any local shrink could pull in the big bucks trying to cure this sort of self esteem problem. It's going to take more than a couple of hours on the couch.